Abstract:

This paper discusses the means by which some British women created professional roles for themselves out of their philanthropic work in India between 1880 and 1900. I examine the development of these roles in the missionary and secular philanthropic communities and how these women used periodicals as a space to implicitly demonstrate their competence and explicitly argue for their status as educators and medical workers. Colonial India provided a particular context of imperial ideals and gendered realities: Indian women were believed to be particularly deprived of learning, medical care and ―civilisation‖ by custom and culture, and Englishwomen could call on the rhetoric of imperial duty to legitimise their care of these disadvantaged women. I argue that India provided the means for British women to demonstrate their capabilities and to involve themselves in the ongoing nineteenth-century project to incorporate women into previously masculine professional societies.